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Globalized urban precarity in Berlin and Abidjan examines urban youth’s practices of making do in digital economies, to understand how precarious working conditions reverberate in the coming of age in contemporary cities. Through a comparative analysis of the perspectives of young men working as airtime sellers in Abidjan and food delivery riders in Berlin, the book provides innovative analytical lenses to understand urban inequalities against the backdrop of current digital urban developments. Essentially, this ethnography challenges the easy conflation of instability with insecurity, and overcomes the centrality of wage labour in research on urban livelihood, by looking at a broader set of economic practices and relational mechanisms. The analysis shows how accruing symbolic capital, a feel for the game in contexts of ambiguity, and access to care are fundamental for explaining the unequal distribution of risks for socio-material insecurities in unstable work settings.
support services across various sectors. Still on the issue of GBV, in studying urban conflict-affected communities in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, Cardoso et al. (2016) reveal that contradictions between what are perceived as traditional versus modern/city gender roles and norms contribute to the perpetration of intimate partner violence. In addition to the aforementioned factor, discrimination, lack of viable economic opportunities, and weak support networks equally play significant roles. To address this, the researchers ( Cardoso et al. , 2016 ) affirmed the need to
One day during my stay in Abidjan, I got the opportunity to present my research project at the German embassy, in an informal discussion round of German expats in Abidjan. The comparison of young precarious workers in Abidjan and Berlin created discomfort amongst my audience. In their feedback, they mainly emphasized the differences between the two contexts: the Ivorian state didn't provide protection for its young citizens at any comparable level to Germany's social welfare state. The demographics contrasted sharply between the two sites, too
, bringing to the fore aspects of social and political lives and ideas that would otherwise have remained hidden from public discourse’ (2012: 1). During the Ivoirian post-electoral crisis of 2010–11, internet discussion sites became a focal point of the political debate and the place where it was writ-large. This is partly due to relatively dense internet connectivity throughout Abidjan, a large Ivoirian diaspora community and a concerted effort by the pro-Gbagbo camp La Majorité présidentielle (LMP) to obtain a strong internet presence through online campaigning
‘Why we are doing this?’, Antoine intuitively began to explain, when I presented my research interest in call box workers to him. ‘It is to not stay here bras croisés . 1 Otherwise we wouldn't choose to be phone box guys. If we had something else somewhere else, we would stop it’ (Interview with Antoine, Koumassi, 10 March 2016, my emphasis). Antoine was studying sociology at the main university of Abidjan, but also sold airtime for a neighbour. The neighbour paid him a monthly return of 30
analysis of my observations and conversations in the fields. Most importantly, they are a result of probing to what extent important mechanisms in Abidjan matter for the context of Berlin. Work as economic practice in processes of commodification In order to grasp subtle and ordinary ways of making ends meet, without using terminology that above all defines them through all that they are not , I situate work in a broader range of possible economic practices: with Polanyi, I understand the term economic as describing ‘the
that concerned workers’ benefits to the workers themselves. This shows formality as ‘piecemeal’ (Neves and du Toit 2012 , 144): technological tools documented the riders’ activity, but workers like Wolfgang needed to undertake a hand-sorted listing of their activity too, and calculate their entitlement for pay by hand, just to formulate their claims through the medium of an official document, the bill. In Abidjan, the distribution of airtime was also increasingly standardized, with the help of platform technology. Airtime sellers were ranked
.’ Everything was different in Berlin though, and there are unexpected twists of fate. So far, instead of shooting films, Tobias had earned a living cycling around the city. He was a part-time bicycle courier at a start-up that delivered food to office workers and the homes of middle-class families. To him, it was just a temporary way to get by. ‘Next month, I'll probably look for something else; maybe start some film projects for real.’ A couple of months earlier, I had encountered Marian, who was a similar age to Tobias, but made his living in Abidjan
sellers to keep going in their everyday life in Berlin or Abidjan. But as sellers and riders, they not only bought and sold goods and services. Work was more than that. Airtime and shifts were not only transacted as market exchanges or dispatched following the application of the rule of most efficient allocation – airtime and shifts circulated as gifts or shares too. And work was a symbolic resource, a setting in which one could perform practices of cultural distinction. Symbolic investments, like spending time with others and gifting, were important to build reputation
Séverin was 25 years old and lived in Koumassi, Abidjan, along with his father. We met at his selling spot, close to a main road of the district, with a lot of circulation, which was beneficial for Séverin's business to sell airtime. The selling spot was barely remarkable, as Séverin literally embodied the phone box, and no other material support identified it: he sat on a bench, with a few mobile phones on his lap, and wore a fancy shoulder bag to store the money and other paraphernalia he needed to work. The casual character of the selling